We Never Go Out of Style

Visualizing Taylor Swift’s 1989-era outfits of the Eras Tour
Published

October 5, 2024

Photo by Paolo Villanueva. IG: @itspaolopv.

This is my second post in a series visualizing the outfits that Taylor Swift wears in her Eras Tour. Of all the outfits Taylor wears in each era, the one that’s particularly interesting to Swifties right now is the 1989 era. From the start of her tour in March 2023 to the end of her Asia-Pacific leg a year later, her outfits were relatively simple. They were always a sparkly metallic skirt/top set with a fringe—always matching in color. And the colors were only ever pink, green, orange, or blue. But then the Europe leg began, and unlike the rest of her Eras outfits, the 1989 outfit deviated massively from what she was wearing before. In my opinion, the mayhem is best illustrated in an Instagram reel compiled by @bigrep1985.

In looking at Taylor’s 1989 outfits over the first year of her Eras Tour, it’s interesting to notice that the blue set debuted at the end of the U.S. and Canada leg in August 2023, and only then did it become a regular fixture in her rotation of outfits. So prior to the massive outfit deviation in the Europe leg, Taylor had already established a precendent for altering the pattern of her 1989 outfit selections.

But then in the Europe leg we begin to see Taylor mix colors between her top and skirt! This is huge because, aside from the introduction of her The Tortured Poet’s Department era, her outfit patterns for all other eras remain consistent between the Asia-Pacific and Europe legs. In the chart below, I’ve tracked statistics for both outfit combinations and individual pieces of these outfits. The dropdown menu in the top right determines which statistics to view.

Because of the unique outfit deviation in Taylor’s 1989 era for the Europe leg, Swifties have sought meaning from these new outfit combinations to ascertain when the much-anticipated Reputation (Taylor’s Version) album will be released. I hope my visualizations can reveal some new findings for the Swifties to predict its release date!

As with my previous post, I give special thanks to Nick Braun (@nicksversion on TikTok) for carefully collecting Taylor’s outfit data throughout the Eras Tour. I used Nick’s spreadsheet to create these visualizations and couldn’t have done it without them!